The wait is finally over for what seems to be one of the most eagerly-anticipated pieces of computer hardware in recent history. Four years in the making and over 2 million engineering hours put into bringing it to life, AMD’s Zen is finally here. Leading the pack for AMD’s new Zen-based processors are three eight-core, sixteen-thread Ryzen 7 SKUs. Fabbed on Global Foundries’ 14nm FinFET process and sporting a transistor count of 4.8 Billion, the new AM4-based chips are targeting prosumers who would have otherwise been tempted onto Intel’s High-End Desktop (HEDT) platform.

With pricing starting at $329 (around £320), we can now finally say that CPUs with eight high-performance cores have hit a level that will be considered affordable to many, rather than a select few. First in line for review is the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X – an 8C16T, 95W TDP chip with a base clock of 3.6GHz, boost clock up to 4.0GHz, and a 4.1GHz Extended Frequency Range (XFR).

AMD Ryzen processors made a strong impression last week, however a number of technical difficulties and time constraints resulted in more questions than answers when it came to the four games we managed to benchmark in time for launch. As promised, we're back to follow up on our initial 1080p testing with a more in-depth look at Ryzen's gaming performance across a 16 titles played at 1080p and 1440p resolutions.

Note that while virtually no gamer would use the combination of a R7 1800X and GTX 1080 at low setting as 1080p. The reason for using this setting in a test scenario is to minimize or eliminate a GPU bottleneck and put the limiting factor back on the CPU to test its abilities in CPU limited scenarios.

Some investigation by well known AMD super user, ‘The Stilt’ has shown that the problem may lie with Windows 10 and the way the OS schedules workloads to the physical and logical cores. While the R7 CPUs can process 16 simultaneous threads, they do only have 8 physical cores, and the speculation is that Windows 10 cannot yet differentiate between Ryzen’s physical cores and a logical cores (a physical core will be faster).

A bug has been discovered in the Windows 10 Scheduler which limits the performance of AMD Ryzen CPUs. The issue is due to the difference between how Windows treat threading between Intel and AMD processors.

For Intel hyperthreading it appropriately prioritizes the main thread and gives secondary threads lower priority. With AMD processors it treats all the threads as equal, meaning lower priority tasks are treated the same as higher priority tasks and overall performance suffers.

Another bug also incorrectly identifies the amount of cache available per thread, with the Windows 10 Scheduler thinking each thread has 136 MB of RAM rather than the actual 20 MB available in the L2+L3 cache combined.

At present the issue is only believed to affect Windows 10. Windows has had scheduler issues in the past, so we are sure a solution is only a software update away.

In the mean time users can disable SMT in the BIOS to improve performance in gaming, but for more multi-threaded work it may be better to leave it enabled.

So why would anyone take the lid off their processor? The practice seemingly started with Intel’s third-generation Ivy Bridge desktop CPUs, as Intel used a cheap thermal interface material (TIM) for transferring the heat from the Integrated Heat Spreader (IHS) to the cooling fan mounted above. The IHS wasn’t soldered to the processor die but positioned using thermal paste and the TIM was simply glued on.

To boost performance, users delidded the processors and either removed the glue so the IHS could sit closer to the processor die, removed the IHS completely, or inserted a high-performance TIM. But the process requires one of two physical means of popping the processor hood — a vice and hammer or using a razor blade. That said, delidding ultimately maximizes cooling and boosts the chip’s speeds.

However, previous reports indicated AMD’s Ryzen processors should not be delidded. The IHS is not only soldered down, but it includes sensors for better temperature management. But that didn’t stop pro-overclocker Der8auer from experimenting with AMD’s Ryzen 7 chips to see if delidding would increase performance due to possible cooler temperatures.